I've spent the past week and a half or so on a lengthy five-part analysis of how politicized postmodernism has damaged the academic humanities while at the same time providing an economic boon to cost-conscious administrators. In writing the series, I realized that in many ways what I was really talking about was bureaucracy, specifically about what happens when the desire to learn, or teach, or do research, or write scholarly essays and books, meets up with the gruesome impersonal reality of Academic Administration. It struck me that politicized postmodernism is in many ways not the cause of academe's intellectual bankruptcy, so much as it is a peculiar effect of that bankruptcy, kind of a dysfunctional mechanism for coping with the impoverishment of a scholarly life lived not according to its own natural rhythms but rather in cramped conformity to an academic timetable.

In other words, I've been thinking that maybe the real problem with American higher ed is one of oversystemization. If you think about it, the notion that you can administer mass education at the collegiate level doesn't make much sense. People don't all learn on the same schedule, and at this level it's positively damaging to try to make them do so. The softening of the mind and the curriculum that results is well documented; so is the devaluation of the B.A. (while buying plane tickets today, I met a perky young travel agent who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000; not a good return on a six figure investment if you ask me, but an increasingly typical one all the same).

Even more ridiculous than the administrative fantasy of universal college education is the notion that you can administer the intellectual. But that is exactly what graduate education and the tenure system seek to do, with their prepackaged, one-size-fits-all degree programs and their ominously named, loudly ticking "tenure clocks." The assumptions underwriting the administration of the intellectual seem to be a) that you can turn someone into an intellectual, and b) that the way to do so is to put prospective intellectuals first through a standardized program of study (where there is neither time nor incentive for truly independent inquiry) and then through a pressurized period of probation (where the results of one's routinized education must be converted into a certain number of publications by a certain date).

Looked at this way, the academic credentialling process sounds pretty stupid. Well, that's because it is. I don't deny that there is much to be said for formal intellectual training, particularly training that takes seriously its responsibilities to a particular discipline while also acknowledging the limitations of that discipline. Nor do I deny that plenty of truly stellar scholars have emerged from the academic system. But the widespread mediocrity I spoke of last week is no accident. It is institutionalized by the system; it is guaranteed by it; one could go so far as to argue that it is what the system is designed to produce.

In the midst of my meditations, I ran across Rick Perlstein's recent American Prospect essay, "The Historical Present." In it, Perlstein argues that the academic culture wars are over, and that the old battles between left and right have been replaced by a new, collective yearning for community (one, he hastens to add, that academics fail to recognize because they are still using the language of the culture wars to describe what is by now a substantively different sort of dissatisfaction). A distaste for the impersonal, overadministered quality of university life unites today's academics, Perlstein contends. Today's faculty and graduate students are far more concerned with "the frustrations an excess of bureaucracy brings to the life of the mind" than they are with fighting about their pet political issues. It's an interesting premise. But an oversimplified and misleading one. I'll explain why in my next post.

to be continued